Mobility 4.0: Big-ticket mobility projects that are yet to come true in Bengaluru

The city has heard, debated and discarded several projects that get mentioned at the whim and fancy of city planners and politicians.Naveen Menezes&Bharath Joshi | ET Bureau | Updated: January 20, 2017, 09:13 IST

Bengaluru to Chennai in just 30 minutes? That is what Hyperloop One, a Los Angeles-based high-speed transport technology firm, has proposed for India.

The excitement around this is probably justified: It is fancy, futuristic and -in the Bengaluru context, where demand far outruns supply in mobility infrastructure - too good to be true.

The reality staring at the city's face is stark. Crossing the Silk Board junction from HSR Layout takes over 40 minutes. Chennai in 30 minutes sounds like an overkill.

Skepticism in Bengaluru around such ambitious projects is deep. The city has heard, debated and discarded several such that get mentioned at the whim and fancy of city planners and politicians. Plans to build a steel flyover between Basaveshwara Circle and Hebbal were revived as mysteriously as it had been dropped and ran into stiff citizen resistance.

Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRCL) has missed several deadlines to complete the first 42 km of its network. Lack of planning is clearly visible: The National College Yelachenahalli elevated corridor was ready almost three years ago but the underground section connecting that portion (in south Bengaluru) to the grid is not ready .

Yet, seemingly unrealistic projects keep popping up.

Here are a few of the most ambitious--if not futuristic--projects that are supposedly in the pipeline for the city.

Elevated corridor

The most expensive of the proposals is the east-west-north-south elevated corridor.

The 109-km road-on-road project, estimated to cost Rs 18,407 crore, promises a 45-minute commute from one end of the city to the other. Centre for SMART Cities director RK Misra, one of the project's promoters, says: "It will decongest city roads as there will be no need for long-distance vehicles to pass through the city .Land acquisition, too, is not going to be a major hurdle as the elevated corridor will come up on the median."

There is, however, no specific timeline for the project's start and end. Soil testing in some parts of the city is the only indication of the project's presence.

Even smaller, short-term mobility projects see time and cost overruns. While the Goraguntepalya flyover overshot the deadline by four years, the Okalipuram signal-free 8-lane corridor was started four years after its foundation stone was laid.

Metrino Poma

While these are conventional infrastructure projects, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, the civic administrator, leaped into the future to pick out a driverless personal rapid transit system, popularly known as Metrino, to propel Bengaluru into the Smart City league. The plan is to connect Marathahalli and Hope Farm junction by a ropeway along which pods, carrying 5-6 people, will move at speeds of about 50 kmph.

Around the same time, French company POMA proposed an intra-city cable car facility to provide feeder services to the Metro rail. In its proposal, the company says the facility can carry 3,000 passengers per hour. Both the Metrino and POMA projects, however, remain mere proposals.

Mass transits

An elevated Light Rail Transit (LRT) is also in the offing. "It's a question of little more time but it will be implemented," says C Jayaram, director (projects) at Bangalore Airport Rail Link Limited, a special purpose vehicle anchoring the project. "The LRT will have a capacity of 15,000-40,000 peak hour peak direction passenger trips (phpdt), very similar to the Metro," he says.

After much study and cost, another project--a highspeed rail link (HSRL) from the city centre to the airport--was shelved in 2016.The promise was of a 160kmph train that could traverse the 40-km distance in 25 minutes. Authorities are now talking about the Metro being extended till the airport.

The Metro, LRT, HSRL and suburban rail are four of the five mass-transit projects that the Comprehensive Traffic and Transportation Plan, 2007, recommended for Bengaluru. The fifth was a bus rapid transit system connecting Hebbal and Silk Board junction, which is also now being replaced by the Metro.

Dead-ends all

While these mammoth projects, en closed in files, moved from desk to government desk, restive citizens voiced the demand for a good-old suburban railway system, a la Mumbai. Besides converting 15 existing conventional trains into electric trains, there is no significant progress on this.

"The Metrino, HSRL, elevated roads... these are fancy announcements that will go nowhere. They are distractions that seem sexy to talk about but don't get to the root of our problem," he says. "We don't have proper footpaths or sufficient investment in public transport.We need to revisit the basics."

Urban mobility expert Ashwin Mahesh wants simple suggestions for Bengaluru, which, he says, can be fixed in two ways: "First, the government should induct another 6,000 fleet of buses and make sure it reaches all parts of the city. Second is walkability. The TenderSURE project should be extended to at least 1,500 roads so that people walk for short trips." Neither of the suggestions, however, sounds futuristic enough.